Donald And The Viking Kings

Donald Trump is not only everybodys favourite president-elect of the United States, he is also related to the John of Gaunt, a 14th century English duke.

John of Gaunt, English Duke who fathered 14 children and basically is to blame for the mess we're in today. Image credit: Lucas Cornelisz de Kock (1495–1552)

Recently I got a hold of Brian Tompsetts incredibly extensive database of European royals and loaded it into a Neo4j graph database. Through that it was easy to look up John of Gaunt and it turns out that 16 generations before John, Trump is a descendant of Harald the II Bluetooth. For non-Danes that is the first king of Denmark, who famously introduced Christianity to the country to reduce the risk of attacks from its larger, Christian neighbors to the south.

Whether Trump has other things than using born-again Christianity for political gains in common with the longboat sailing and slave selling King of Denmark remains to be seen and while Bluetooth did build a wall to keep his southern neighbors out history says nothing about whether he made the Holy Roman Empire pay for it. If not then Trump has plenty of other noble forebears to use as inspiration; just through John of Gaunt he is directly related to at least 220 titles, including a Khan of the Cumans, a word which literally means “pale, unhealthy yellow” in Turkic, a reference to the Cumans being blonde. Which I guess explains the hair.

Among Trumps other royal relatives we find another descendant of John of Gaunt, Louis XIV of France and if there is such a thing as a gene for taste (or lack thereof) in interior decoration it seems to have been expressed in both the coming president and the Sun King of France.

To the left the Versailles bedroom of Louis XIV. To the right the entrance to Donald Trumps New York Apartment. Image credit: Jean Marie Hulot, CC BY 3.0